Flashback photos from the spring of 2020 when most cats were wondering why their people were huddling at home and only venturing out cautiously with masks and gloves.
Taken during the spring of 2020 during the height of the quarantine, which Bud was blissfully oblivious to!
Big Buddy is convalescing with the help of our hero, Little Buddy.
Hello admirers of the most handsome and meowscular cat in the world!
I’ve gotten some messages from people asking if Bud and I are okay and just wanted to let you know we are, and we’ll be back soon.
I planned a brief hiatus, no more than a few days to recharge the creative batteries. That hiatus was extended when I flew to Washington to hang out with my brother, his wife and the kiddos.
Then I returned home, assisted with a family emergency, got sick shortly afterward and tested positive for COVID.
It feels kind of strange to have lived through the original COVID wave that brutalized New York in 2020, as well as the subsequent delta and omicron waves, managing to avoid infection only to get COVID now in the summer of 2023. But if getting it was inevitable, I’m grateful it happened after I’ve been vaccinated and boosted, and not in those chaotic, horrific early waves when doctors weren’t sure what they were dealing with.
COVID hit me hard, like an extremely intense flu with a grab bag of other symptoms thrown in for good measure, but I’m very grateful I haven’t suffered major upper respiratory distress. Likewise, I’m grateful that my congenital heart problem — an extremely rare valve deformation — was not a factor, because that was my biggest worry.
I am aware that cats can catch COVID, and in the back of my mind I always imagined quarantining myself from Buddy if I came down with it, but cats have their own plans for things and Bud, who is already famously intolerant of any distance or closed doors between us, has a longstanding policy of never leaving my side when I’m sick. Quarantining from Bud was not an option. There’s no way to communicate the why of it to him, and on the practical side I have not had the energy to cordon him off, assuming that’s even possible. Knowing him, he’d quickly find a way to circumvent any barriers and, failing that, he’d meow incessantly and refuse to allow me a minute’s peace until this farce (“Closed doors between us, can you believe it?!?”) was ended.
Just one more reason to love the little guy and be grateful for him, but of course I’ll be watching him closely.
For now I’ll be happy to see the other side of this. Getting really sick is always a good reminder to be grateful for health, and in particular this experience helped me understand that despite vaccines, masks, air filters, hand sanitizers and careful behavior, so much is left to chance.
So that’s what’s happening here. I apologize for our extended absence, and I look forward to returning to our regularly scheduled cat content — same Buddy time, same Buddy channel — in the near future.
Would you bring your cat(s) to the movies?
The whole pet thing takes on a different vibe in Asia.
I first saw it in Tokyo where people push their cats along in baby strollers and luxury shops sell thousand-dollar accessories for felines and canines alike.
In countries like China it’s become a thing to dress pets in “cute little outfits” and pose them like dolls for social media snaps.
Now in Thailand — which is second only to China in pet ownership on the continent — people can bring their cats and dogs to the movies.
Agence France-Presse sent a reporter there to witness costumed Chihuahuas and poodles arrive by stroller and sit next to their humans for a screening of The Little Mermaid. A cat, who probably had no idea what the hell was going on, was plopped down on the seat next to her human.
A spokesman for the Bangkok cineplex told AFP he thinks pet-friendly cinemas will bring people back to the movies after the pandemic. Pet owners, he said, have been less likely to leave home because their animals are now used to having them around all the time and experience separation anxiety when they leave.
As Bud’s loyal servant I know he does have separation anxiety, but I wouldn’t bring him to the local Alamo Drafthouse or AMC even if they had pet-friendly screenings here.
For one thing, he’s a damn cat! He’s not interested in screens unless they’re showing birds feasting on seeds in a forest, with all the accompanying sounds, while he’s viewing it from the safety of his own home
Second, I know precisely how he’d react, and he wouldn’t take well to being in a theater with a bunch of dogs and a handful of other cats. He’d spend half the movie hissing and the other half crying. I can’t imagine it being a fun experience for him.
Then there’s the “dress code.” Pets in Thailand’s new animal-friendly screenings must wear diapers and sit in bags provided by the theater. This is to ensure they won’t defecate all over the seats, obviously, but my cat has never even tolerated a collar. The chances of him accepting a diaper are zero.
Lastly, at the risk of getting myself into trouble, the entire idea sounds about as appealing as trying to watch a non-kids movie in a theater full of screaming six-year-olds.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved accompanying my nieces to see the Super Mario Brothers movie, watching their delight at seeing the Mushroom Kingdom, Princess Peach, Mario and Luigi brought to life. (“You kids today with your Nintendo Switches, your fancy graphics and your networked games. We had Gameboy. It only had two colors, and you had to put little cartridges inside it to play games, and when they didn’t work we had to blow the dust out of ’em. You don’t know how good you got it, you kids today!”)
But do I want to be responsible for a feline with the intellectual development of a young child while I’m trying to watch a movie? If by some miracle Bud would stop hissing and/or crying, he’d focus on me and start yapping for snacks.
The movies just aren’t a great place for cats, and I’m not sure dogs would be thrilled to be there either.
Now, a hookah bar where you could bring your cat and give him his own little hookah filled with catnip? Maybe that could work.
“Yes, I’ll take an Amstel Light and a bag of your best Meowie Wowie for my little buddy here. Can I see the bar food and pate menus as well? We’ve just come from seeing John Wick 11 at the movies and we’re both famished!”
The importers are accused of jacking up prices almost 16 fold on FIPV drugs they illegally imported from China, the FDA says.
FIPV is pretty much a guaranteed death sentence for cats, and the only way to cure it is with an experimental drug that doesn’t have FDA approval.
Oregon’s Nancy Ross and Nicole Randall of Texas knew that, and as importers selling the cure via the popular Facebook group FIP Warriors, the FDA says they banked on the desperation of people who would do almost anything to save their cats — including forking over vast sums of money.
Ross and Randall are now accused by the FDA of smuggling GS-441524 from China, where it’s manufactured illegally, and hiking the price by almost 16 times what they paid for it as they served as the middle women between desperate cat owners and the suppliers in Hong Kong.
Feline infectious peritonitis kills some 95 percent of cats it infects, and veterinarians often tell their clients with FIPV cats that while they can’t prescribe GS-441524, they will help administer it, track their cats’ progress through bloodwork and hopefully save feline lives — if the clients obtain the drug themselves.
FIP Warriors — now in its fifth incarnation as FIP Warriors 5.0 on Facebook — is where people with FIPV cats go to find suppliers. The group has more than 43,000 members, and the FDA says Randall made millions off of them, charging as much as $385 for vials of GS-441524 she obtained for between $25 and $45 from manufacturers in Hong Kong and mainland China.
Randall sold $9.6 million worth of GS-441524 to clients in the US, according to the FDA. Per The Oregonian:
“A spreadsheet found in Randall’s Google email showed customer orders of at least 58,460 vials and 236,836 pills of GS-441524 from July 2020 through June 6, 2022, the affidavit said.”
PITB spoke to several people who paid thousands of dollars for GS-441524 after their cats were diagnosed with FIPV. All of them said they were surprised by the news of the FDA’s investigation, and said they were given various reasons for why the drug was so expensive to acquire.
One customer from Texas, whose cat Seth began his regimen in July of 2020, told PITB she doesn’t regret spending the money to cure Seth, but she “can see how the people saw our desperate situation and took advantage of us.” She was told prices were at a premium because of scarcity.
“It was a very stressful time for us, and every time we needed to refill, they charged us more,” she said. “They knew we couldn’t say no.”
Another woman, whose kitten was diagnosed with FIPV in 2021, “was told that the prices were set because they ensure the medication was purchased from a trusted source.”
As a college student at the time, she used her savings and crowdfunded the other half, paying more than $5,000 for her kitten’s treatment. She said she doesn’t think the administrators of the group were ripping her off, since they had FIP cats of their own, and likely didn’t know the importers were making huge profits. She trusted the seller — who was not Ross or Randall — because the group vouched for that person, assuring her they supplied real pills.
“Of course, I don’t think this is a valid justification for hiking up prices up to 16x the amount,” she told PITB, “but I’m sincerely hoping the individual [accused by the FDA] had a valid reason for setting the prices that she did.”
Others paid even more exorbitant prices: a British woman we interviewed for a story about FIPV in 2022 said she paid about £7,000, or $9,400 at the time.
FDA investigators said they intercepted shipments from China and Hong Kong disguised as COVID masks, cat shampoo and chewable medicine for pets, and the Oregonian report says the shipments were listed as “essential oils” and “beauty products” in import documents.
Randall and Ross have not been charged criminally, but they are now targets of a civil asset forfeiture case:
“The government seized five of Randall’s bank and brokerage accounts and her 2022 Tesla Model Y car last year based on a warrant signed by a federal magistrate judge in Oregon.
The warrant identified the bank accounts and car as proceeds from the “crime of smuggling” and subject to forfeiture, according to the affidavit. It also alleged Randall, now 35, used the proceeds to buy several properties, including a ranch in Leander, Texas, in July 2021.”
While the FDA’s affidavit went into detail regarding Randall’s earnings, it describes shipments sent to Ross but does not specify how much she may have made in profit. An attorney for Randall told The Oregonian that the Texas woman will fight the civil asset forfeiture.
The illegal market for GS-441524 exists because the drug’s creator, Gilead Sciences of California, declined to submit it to the FDA for approval. That’s because it’s chemically similar to another drug the company makes, remdesivir, which was floated as a possible treatment for COVID-19. The company was worried any snags in a potential approval process for GS-441524 would also ensnare remdesivir, according to reports, putting the latter drug in limbo during the pandemic.
Now that the pandemic has retreated to much lower levels of infection and death, it’s not clear if Gilead Sciences will reconsider its FIPV medication, but there may be hope in the form of alternate treatments. A report from the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) says scientists at the University of California-Davis and UC San Diego are working on several promising therapies, including a potential treatment using CRISPR gene-editing technology.
Things could have gone south for cats during the early days of the COVID-19 virus.
Someone bring this cat inside, give him a magnificent meal and make him king of the house.
After a man fell 30 feet down a “seasonal waterfall” into a creek drainage in Pleasant Valley, Calif., about 50 miles east of Sacramento, an insistently meowing outdoor cat led the man’s wife and neighbor “right to where the man fell,” per CBS News.
The incident happened a few minutes after 9 p.m. on Feb. 21, according to the El Dorado County Fire Protection District, whose EMTs rescued the man. Authorities haven’t provided updates on his status, but as he was airlifted to a hospital, his injuries were likely serious.
The heroic feline is described as the family’s “outdoor cat.” He should be amply rewarded with a real home.
A former UK health minister said the government mulled a plan to “exterminate all pet cats” early in the Coronavirus pandemic when the virus was new and poorly understood, the Guardian reported.
“What we shouldn’t forget is how little we understood about this disease. There was a moment we were very unclear about whether domestic pets could transmit the disease,” James Bethel told the UK’s Channel 4 news. “In fact, there was an idea at one moment that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?”
Yeah, I can imagine a few million incredulous and angry people drawing their blinds, hiding their cats and figuring out ways to buy cat food and litter on the black market to avoid tipping off the authorities in the heavily CCTV-wired nation. If authorities tried to push the issue, things would have gotten ugly.
Here in the US we’d have another run on guns and Bud would run screaming underneath my bed, probably while demanding I slide his turkey and water bowl to him so he could lay low from “the feds.” Hey, he runs a catnip cartel. He’s used to it!
All jokes aside, I think we’ve forgotten that Chinese authorities were beating pets dead in the street and going house-to-house to put them down when the virus raged through the population there for the first time in late 2019. Animal welfare groups said thousands of pets were abandoned by their caretakers and either left to starve in empty homes or left to fend for themselves.
When the virus spread, ripping through countries like Italy, France, Belgium, Russia and taking hold in New York before spreading to the rest of the US, virologists still weren’t entirely certain whether cats — who are susceptible to an unrelated form of Coronavirus — could pass the infection to people. It’s not far-fetched to imagine that if the UK or other countries decided felines must be culled, US authorities may have followed.
The idea of a government demanding we kill our cats is disturbing on its own, never mind the prospect of it happening during a time when our pets were the few things helping us keep our sanity while we all huddled in isolation.
Thankfully reason prevailed and research ultimately proved that the chances of cats or dogs spreading COVID to humans is almost nonexistent.
Pain In The Bud 